The first time I ever talked to Ralph Branca was on the telephone. This wouldn’t be such a remarkable thing if not for the man who had handed me the receiver after dialing the number himself, saying hello, and sharing a private joke that made both of them laugh hysterically.

That man was Bobby Thomson.

“Ask Ralph how many of the speaking fees he’s given back over the years,” Thomson, sitting on his couch, said loud enough for Branca to hear, and again both men roared. This was right around the time when it became a matter of record that the Giants had decoded all the Dodgers’ signs from the summer of 1951, that they’d set up a scout in the center-field offices at the Polo Grounds.

Thomson, impish grin on his face, had said before dialing the number: “Even if you know what’s coming, and I’m not saying I knew what was coming, you still have to hit the damned ball.”

Said Branca: “He hit the damned ball all right. And I’ve spent the last 50 years watching it over and over and over …”

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In truth, Ralph Branca spent the last 65 years of his life watching that fastball, watching Thomson hit the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, remembering his own voice fruitlessly plead with the ball — “Sink! Sink! Sink!” — before seeing it disappear over Andy Pafko’s head and into the stands, watching his shoulders slump, taking that eternal walk to the visiting clubhouse in center field, destined forever to be one half of the most famous at-bat of all time.

Branca was 25 that day. He’d been a 21-game winner at 21, started Game 1 of the 1947 World Series for the Dodgers. There would be a famous picture taken a few minutes after he entered the clubhouse after surrendering the home run to Thomson four years later, him lying on a staircase on his stomach, his arms over his eyes, a Brooklyn coach named Cookie Lavagetto sitting next to him, clearly helpless in trying to make him feel better.

“Even then, I wasn’t sad for me,” Branca told me a few years ago. “I was an athlete my whole life, and that’s part of the deal: Someone has to lose, and sometimes that’s you. What bothered me was looking at Jackie, at Pee Wee, at Gil, at Newk and Duke and Campy. Knowing I’d let them down. If you ever competed on a team, you know what that feeling is like.”

Less than an hour later, though, Branca was with his fiancée, Ann Mulvey; they would be married 17 days later. With them was Father Pat Rawley, Ann’s cousin, a Jesuit priest at Fordham.

Branca had a simple question for the cleric.

“Why me, Father?”

“God chose you,” Rawley said, “because he knew you were strong enough to bear this cross.”

And that is precisely what he did, for 65 years, one month and 20 days. Yes, Branca and Thomson became something of a vaudeville act over the decades, regulars on the rubber-chicken circuit, beginning the very next week at Yankee Stadium, where they posed for pictures together. That winter, the two performed a skit at the New York baseball writers’ dinner, the lyrics to “Because of You” appropriately altered.

Thomson always marveled at his partner’s dignity. “For me,” he said, “it’s understandable, because that moment was the best thing that ever happened to me. It may have been the best thing that ever happened to anybody. It was Ralph that allowed people to enjoy it, though. His grace. His good humor.”

That’s who Branca was, though, long before his fastball caught too much of the plate on Oct. 3, 1951. He was an early friend and champion of Jackie Robinson, one of the few to greet him as an equal the first day he walked into the clubhouse.

“Ralph Branca was good to Jack,” Rachel Robinson told me in 2007, “when it wasn’t fashionable to be good to Jack.”

Branca always dismissed the notion that he was some kind of social maverick for that, crediting his upbringing in Mount Vernon, where Italian, Irish, Jewish and black kids all vied to play for the Ninth Avenue Vandies, a team whose only prejudice was against those who couldn’t excel at the game.

Later in life, he would head up the Baseball Assistance Team, designed to help big leaguers down on their luck. And always, he was a source of laughter and fierce pride. The last time I talked to Branca on the telephone was the day in 2002 when his son-in-law, Bobby Valentine, was fired by the Mets.

“They’ll only know what they had,” he said, sadly, in that amazingly familiar voice, “once he’s gone.”

Thankfully, we never had any such worry about Ralph Branca, a local treasure from the day he debuted as a Dodger until the moment he took his last breath Wednesday morning. “In his 91st year on Earth,” Valentine tweeted Wednesday, “he left us with the same dignity and grace that defined his every day.”

Yes. In Ralph Branca, we always knew what we had. And we know what we’ve lost.